The Fringes Are Still Listening to Ron Paul

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GREENVILLE, S.C. — The best place to hang out at a Ron Paul event is at the edges of the crowd. That's where you can meet the people who come to see Ron Paul because they look into his eyes and see there, reflected, all their own personal grudges and enthusiasms. In Iowa and, to a lesser extent, in New Hampshire, you'd find gun enthusiasts and the really hardcore anti-war types, the latter the kind of people who make those we're-sorry-about-Iraq-now types in the Democratic establishment very nervous. Here? Well, here the indigenous political fauna are even more exotic. One gentleman with a fine bit of artwork down the back of his neck wanders the crowd, handing out literature and membership cards for the Oath Keepers, an interesting right-wing bunch made up of former and current law-enforcement officers who swear not to carry out any orders that are not, by their lights, constitutional. (Recently, the Oath Keepers have teed up both the SOPA law and the National Defense Authorization Act, so they must be progressives or something.) The handbill was an ad for a engagement by one Bob McLain, a local radio host, who would discuss, it said, among other topics, "What Does the 13th Amendment Really Say?", "What Was The Purpose Of The War of 1812?", and "What Was Seward's Folly All About?" (I was sort of intrigued by that last one but, alas, recordings will not be permitted.) I was in the middle of contemplating what might be wrong with Alaska besides the Palin family when a nice old lady came smiling up and handed me a flyer in which it was explained that the Vatican is at the back of a one-world global economic scheme "as the end times approach."

"The current global economic crisis has been brought on through largely socialistic principles," the flyer said.

Apparently, both Benedict XV and the upper echelons of Goldman Sachs are rife with socialists. Why in hell isn't Bernie Sanders richer than he is? Life is not fair.

There is a sheen of messianism running through all of this material. They have cracked the code. They are the Gnostics, the keepers of the hidden knowledge — except, of course, for those of them who believe that the actual Gnostics, working through the Templars, the Illuminati, the Masons, and the Council on Foreign Relations, have been controlling the world since they stumbled out of the Sinai 2000 years ago. They are here because they know they will get a hearing here because, alone among serious American political candidates of the past 50 years, that same messianic sheen is what lights up Dr. Ron Paul, who Knows What's Really Going On.

He is comfortable with the fringes, and this is not always entirely a bad thing. After all, in 1966 and 1967, Gene McCarthy was hanging with what were then the fringes. But he always was the Catholic intellectual, the half-poet who kept his own counsel. On the other hand, Ron Paul speaks the language of the fringes as well as anyone ever has. When he talks about his "movement," and he mentions that "the remnant" is "coming home," that's not just a nice turn of phrase. It's Armageddon-speak, the kind of thing you hear on short-wave sets in the Texas desert. It is the way the end-times religious groups talk about the faithful who will survive the final millennial battle. (It is also the name of a hyper-traditional Catholic newspaper.) And, when he starts using his conjuring words — "the Constitution" and "liberty" — he does so the same way televangelists use "Scripture" or "Christian." People hear in them what they want to hear, and he's happy to let them. The problem is that a lot of what he says is as internally cacophonous as the varied opinions of the people who hear from him just what they want to hear. Late on Friday afternoon, in a chilly hangar at the Greenville Downtown Airport, as the rain grew steady on the tarmac outside, he tried to reclaim some odd variation of the social safety net for libertarianism.

"We, who call ourselves conservatives, or constitutionalists, have made one serious mistake," he told the crowd. "The people who want a socialist, interventionist government they say, we care about people. You guys don't care about people, you only care about freedom. I think that's a pretty important thing to care about! But they say they're the people who want to give you free health care, and all these other things, and the truth is, it always fails.

"If we truly care about freedom, we have to explain that we need to keep our money in the marketplace. That's the way we maximize a middle class in this country. With limited government, and with freedom, we will solve our economic problems and, then all our social problems."

I have no idea what any of this means, any more than I knew what he was talking about earlier when he explained that, historically, the best times for the middle class were when government was limited in its ability to do anything for it. (He might have talking about the days 1913, which is when Paul thinks Woodrow Wilson finished building the handbasket to send us all to hell.) Listening to him, it finally became clear how it came about on Thursday night that Newt Gingrich had to explain to the only veteran on the stage what the G.I. Bill was, and how it helped create the biggest middle class in the history of the world. Ron Paul's great flaw is that he thinks his libertarianism is expansive when, in fact, it's so doctrinaire that he looks silly trying to wedge everything he can into its parameters. Sooner or later, even libertarian governments have to do something for the people who support it.

Jeff Austin has been with the Ron Paul campaign for two elections now. "He is," says Austin, "the only candidate who, when he speaks about liberty, it touches my heart. You know? When people ask us what we see in him, we always answer, 'Why don't you see it?'

"We knew after 2008 that it was possible that Dr. Paul might not run again. We kept asking him because we knew it wasn't about him. It was never about him. It's about the message he's bringing. It was never going to be about himself, in grandiose terms. After him? It could be anybody. It could be anybody in this room right here. It could be anybody in any of the other states. We are all Ron Paul."

The rain fell harder outside the hangar. Some people stayed inside to ride it out. The remnant.